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Tuesday, May 23, 2006

The Internet Poetry Archive (University of North Carolina Press) has audio files of Wilbur reading. He reads well. Dimensions of the poetry are heightened -- his wit and heart more evident.

The Archive also has other poets reading: Seamus Heaney and Robert Pinsky among my favorites. Includes Pinsky's amazing reading of "Shirt." Having toiled before a sewing machine a few hours myself, this reading gives me shivers.

Monday, May 22, 2006

I especially like Longenbach's summation of Wilbur's importance with a quote from one of his poems:

"Wilbur's poems matter not because they may or may not be stylish at any given moment but because they keep the English language alive: Wilbur's great poems feel as fresh—as astonishing, as perplexing, as shocking—as they did 50 years ago. There are no other poems like them. Forget anything you've ever heard about the emblematic Wilbur and listen to the last five stanzas of 'For the New Railway Station in Rome.'"

Longenbach quotes these stanzas of Wilbur's:

See, from the travertineFace of the office block, the roof of the booking-hallSails out into the air beside the ruinedServian Wall,

Echoing in its lightAnd cantilevered swoop of reinforced concreteThe broken profile of these stones, defeatingThat defeat

And straying the strummed mind,By such a sudden chord as raised the town of Troy,To where the least shard of the world sings outIn stubborn joy,

"What city is eternalBut that which prints itself within the groping headOut of the blue unbroken reveriesOf the building dead?

"What is our praise or prideBut to imagine excellence, and try to make it?What does it say over the door of HeavenBut homo fecit?"

Longenbach goes on to observe:

"Wilbur's great poems are always marked by this combination of the high wire and the homespun. They usually begin in an occasional, almost off-hand manner: He notices something in the world (sheets hanging on a wash line), then invites us to notice it too. Immediately we're drawn into the poem by the movement of the language, and before we know it, the sheets have become angels, and we're swept up in a metaphysical conundrum that feels at once deeply serious and ridiculously human: Do we imagine angels because we do laundry or do we do laundry because of a higher purpose? The poem's title, lifted from St. Augustine, doesn't so much provide an answer as a challenge: 'Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.'"

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About Me

Rachel Abramson Dacus is the
author of three books: Gods of Water and Air, Earth Lessons, Femme au Chapeau, and the spoken word CD
A God You Can Dance. She is a widely
published poet, dramatist, and writer of fiction and non-fiction. She is currently working
on a novel, The Renaissance Club, a
time travel romance involving the great Baroque sculptor, Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and raises funds for nonprofit
organizations. You can read more Rachel on her website http://racheldacus.net and purchase Gods of Water and Air at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Gods-Water-Air-Rachel-Dacus/dp/0615842410